Douglas Crase on John Ashbery [on JA’s Birthday]

from “Driving by the Lake with John Ashbery” by Douglas Crase

left: Larry Rivers’s portrait of John Ashbery and “Pyrography”(circa 1976)

Driving by the Lake With John Ashbery

John never insisted on being the sole poet you were allowed to admire. Not long after he sent Three Poems he embarked on a mission clearly designed to improve my library. Freely Espousing arrived, by James Schuyler, followed by the recently published Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. To these he soon added Hebdomeros, Hesiod, and Raymond Queneau. If you hadn’t majored in literature, as I hadn’t, John’s erudition was thrilling and his eagerness to share it, a revelation.

Gradually I discovered he did not know everything. He was rather a snob about classic American literature—he once admitted this—which must qualify as a blind spot when you think of it, since the man who could write “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” was enthralled by American comics, old movies, and popular culture. But when I ventured to say how cool it was that he actually grew up by blue Ontario’s shore he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I had to explain that this was the title of the grand poem in which Walt Whitman summons the poets of the American future; so his being born and raised on that very shore made it seem Whitman had John in mind. At this he didn’t sneer, but said nothing. Years later he took to reading Whitman and claimed that perhaps he’d been influenced after all.

But Whitman or no, there are numerous lakes and shorelines to be found in John’s poems, and a persuasive list of examples to demonstrate how Rochester and its environs once lent their climate to his work. His poem “The Chateau Hardware” is in effect a greeting card from the place that formed him. Anyone who has lived beneath the gray skies of Rochester can acknowledge the truth of the opening line, “It was always November there.” I loved this poem the moment I read it, a feeling that was intensified when John pointed out from the car the location on Monroe Avenue of the mundane hardware store that provided the allusive title. In the rush of time, both the store and its sign—Chateau Hardware—were gone. >>>

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